1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains in general to determining reputations of websites and other entities, and in particular to determining reputations based on consumer exposure statistics.
2. Description of the Related Art
Consumers interacting with websites on the Internet face a variety of risks when they provide private information. For example, a consumer that provides an email address to a website runs the risk that the website will send unsolicited email to that address. A consumer that provides a credit card to a website similarly runs the risk that the website will abuse the credit card by, e.g., making bogus charges.
Consumers are often willing to provide private information to large, well-known websites because such sites have good reputations. Thus, the consumers can feel confident that the sites will not abuse their private information. However, there are many lesser known websites on the Internet that consumers sometimes patronize, often without having a good sense of whether the sites can be trusted to not misuse private information.
Reputation systems can be used to gather and provide information about various aspects of websites from customers, such as whether the sites can be trusted with private information. Generally, a website that has misused consumers' private information in the past will receive a bad reputation from consumers, thereby notifying other consumers of the risks associated with the site.
However, existing reputation systems have problems, such as not being able to differentiate among websites with high levels of granularity. For example, conventional website reputation systems can help consumers sort out good versus bad websites, but these systems are unable to provide valuable information to the consumers in distinguishing different levels of “good”. Thus, a “good” merchant might still sell customer lists, or have employees that do not follow proper security procedures, potentially exposing consumers to credit card theft or spam.
As alluded to above, existing reputation systems focus on gauging various aspects of a website's reputation by allowing consumers to leave feedback regarding a visited website, and rating the website based on the feedback. A problem with these systems is that they rate websites based on subjective feedback. For example, a consumer may wrongly accuse a website of being a source of spam or post a bad review because his or her order arrived a day or two late. Further, many consumers may not bother to provide feedback at all.
Thus, existing reputation systems do not provide enough granularity in reputation ratings, and can be unduly influenced by subjective evaluations.